Registration Forms

Almost everything on net needs registration. So it becomes very important to design them as easy to use as possible. As a designer, even I tend design other pages of a site more carefully than the registration page (Ahh!! User is going to use just once). But I realize that badly designed Registration pages could mean less users getting registered to your website.

Lately, in my quest to be more aware of the web, I explored many websites. Some of which required registration. My spirit was let down looking at the lengthy registration form and sometimes didn’t have the courage to fill them. I have half registered many a sites and left because it was not easy to use.

I am listing down some of the common mistakes I see in the registration forms

1. Long Registration Forms: There are lot of fields to be entered some of which may not be required. Logical grouping of fields is not done.
   Only the necessary fields should be present. Other fields, which are not so important can be presented after one is registered. The Fields should be grouped into smaller chunks.
   
   
2. Producing all the fields at once: This discourages the user to go through the heavy looking pages.
   Try to divide the whole process into smaller chunks. Starting from most important first.
   
   
3. If the Form is divided over few pages, there is no indication of how many pages in total the form has and where among those are you currently.
   The UI should inform the user about how long the whole process is.
   
   
4. Mandatory Fields are not marked
   Should mark them
   
   
5. Inappropriate error messages: Error messages are either too technical to be understood by a layman or they are too short to make any sense.
   Error messages should be appropriate. A good practice is to mark the fields, which need to be re-entered with a summary at the top of the page. Thumb rule for error messages which I follow at least: Punch Line( error statement in 4-5 words), Details of error (In small text), Next Steps (what should the user do).
   
   
6. No option to check availability of a username.
   This features avoids lot of irritation later if you don’t find the username existing

One other issue which bugs me every time is the jumping through fields everytime. Over usage of forms make me feel lazy and I seldom use mouse for a form. Its easier using tab through the keyboard. Please dont ask me to use mouse again in between a form! The combination of mouse and keyboard to fill a form becomes a heavy task. The co-ordination between mouse and keyboard is often required while you enter your birth date in a form using the dropdowns. I find it not very accessible. Especially when you are entering the year. In most of the cases you have to use the arrow key a lot, if you are not using a mouse. Say if your birth year is 1981, you will press key "1", which will take you to 1999 in most cases. Now you need to go back to 1981 by pressing up arrow. If you are using mouse, it opens a long list of years and choosing your birth year becomes a bit of a task. Same for date and month. In most cases you need to press lot of keys, a lot of times.

The answer is with Mozilla firefox. If you use Mozilla to enter a form, you can just type your DOB over the dropdowns. That is to say if you type 28 and the dropdown will jump to 28 and if you type 1981 and the dropdown will jump to that. This makes the dropdowns really accessible. I hope IE also helps its user by this feature.

Some good registeration forms:
1. http://digg.com/register
2. https://secure.del.icio.us/register

Try registering a form on Mozilla!